America's Safest Cities

Beth Greenfield
, ContributorTravel thrills me—luxurious or simple, far afield or a state away.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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Behind the Numbers

To find America's 10 safest cities, we looked at metropolises with populations above 250,000. We ranked them by violent crime rates—the number of violent crimes (murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault) per 100,000 residents in 2010, as reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Because the FBI only compiles data from municipalities that submit complete reports, we were only able to look at 72 cities; Chicago was not included in our ranking.

We also ranked each city on the traffic-fatality rate per 100,000 residents based on 2009 data, the most recent available, from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. We then averaged the ranking for each city to arrive at final scores. In the event of ties, the city with the lower crime rate got the higher ranking.

In third place on our list is Honolulu, which ranks fourth lowest for violent crime and seventh lowest for traffic fatalities. The city is relatively well off, with a median household income of $54,828, above the national average of $50,046, and a below average poverty rate of 10.5%. Hawaii has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, and that famous relaxed aloha spirit may play a role in keeping accident and violence rates low. “Honolulu is kind of like a big small town where everyone seems connected,” says Dave Kahaulelio, president of the Honolulu chapter of the Risk and Insurance Management Society.

Kahaulelio also notes a key factor behind Honolulu’s low traffic-fatality rate—4.27 per 100,000— is gridlock. “Our roads are often congested because we have two main arteries,” he says.

Russ Rader, vice president of communications for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, concurs that congestion is a good thing when it comes to traffic safety. “If traffic is often gridlocked, no one can drive fast enough to kill themselves or others,” he says. “Cities, by their nature, tend to have low fatality rates because speeds are low and traffic is dense, while rural roads tend to be more dangerous.”

That certainly rings true in the biggest city—and perhaps biggest surprise—on our list: New York City at No. 10. Major arteries are frequently backed up there, which may well explain why Gotham ranked No. 3 for lowest traffic-fatality rates, with just 3.17 per 100,000. Good public transportation and a relatively low car ownership rate also help.

But how to explain New York City’s relatively low violent-crime rate of 582 per 100,000, 27th-lowest among U.S. cities over 250,000 in population? Criminal justice professor Mike Maxfield, of John Jay College in New York City, points out that it has most of the resources that are key to urban safety: “wealth, effective policing and other guardianship, public spaces that are heavily used by a broad cross-section of people, institutions that attract people—parks, museums, shopping, entertainment—and effective governance, generally.”

But the Big Apple is still a mixed bag. “It’s also incredibly diverse with a great deal of inequality. That means that though New York is statistically safe as a city, safety, like wealth, is unevenly distributed,” Maxfield adds. “All of New York is better governed and better policed than 20 years ago and violence is lower everywhere. But it’s much lower in some places than in others.”

An earlier version of this article included a photo that was incorrectly identified as Aurora, Colo. The image was of Stapleton, Colo. and not Aurora, Colo.